Over the last few months, we’ve been accelerating our efforts to deal with certain kinds of cheating that players often call “bots” – the use of automation to play the game in exploitative ways. As you know, bots are often operated by people who exploit the game in order to make money selling in-game resources and leveling services to other players. Botting is explicitly against the Blizzard End User License Agreement, and we take strong actions against those who cheat in World of Warcraft.
We’ve recently seen some WoW Classic players ask “How can we help Blizzard get rid of bots?” and the answer remains the same: please continue to report them. And thank you for doing so.
Right-click reporting a player for cheating is the best way you can participate in our speedily removing bot accounts. Your right-click reports go straight to our team of agents who investigate these issues, and who can then determine if further action is warranted.
Thank you to everyone who has right-click reported potential bots so far; we really appreciate you taking the time to help us make the game nicer and fairer. Please continue to send us your reports as much as possible, and we’ll continue to enforce the rules as swiftly as we can.
Would be useful if you were able to report bots that you can’t target. I know some are doing Maraudon automated power leveling but it’s impossible to report them by just doing a /who with their name and try to right click and report… the option is not there.
That’s great. The communication is appreciated, but I think much of the community was hoping for a little more than that. Queues have started to pop up on some realms and I think we can all be fairly certain that these queues wouldn’t exist if bots were cleaned out.
You guys may need to commit more resources to dealing with the issue. Putting the responsibility on the legitimate players is kind of lame. I right click report bots frequently. But I really shouldn’t even have to. $15/month should pay for a bot-free or nearly bot-free environment on a game where there is minimal new development.
I’m sure it’s not a simple problem to solve. But I’d find it very hard to believe that you guys don’t have the resources to do it.
I love Classic. I’ve been playing it since launch day and I’ll be playing it for a long long time. I just hope you guys can give Classic as much love as I do.
I think the biggest concern are ban waves and how much time passes between the waves. By the time they go out the impact on server economy has already been felt.
That’s it? a blue post saying ‘thank you’? Rather disappointing. People have been using the report button forever, only to see the same bots at the same spots months later.
And what about the fly exploits? I dont see that being mentioned anywhere.
Never mind the constant forum posts and the reintroduction of layering on an ever increasing number of servers - The most eye opening (and frankly damning) thing I’ve seen is in those nexus AH graphs. Look at the those markets (orbs/major mana pots) over the past 90 days. The volume increases are crazy…and before they were relatively stable.
That’s insane. You’ve tripled the volume of goods in the market of items in these “high end” markets. That can only come from legions of robots. Legions of robots that not only destroy economies - they create ques for your actual players.
“The fault, dear WoW players, is not in our stars,But in ourselves”
These bots exist to appease the desires of a segment of the community, who want to take shortcuts, so the only way to combat this is to put a daily/weekly limit on farmable items.
